Before setting foot in the Cooley Gallery, the presence of a major exhibition on campus is heralded on Reed College’s front lawn. Austrian artist Marko Lulic’s “Edifice Complex”—an enormous, bright pink steel sculpture of just those two words—calls attention to the cluster of buildings surrounding it and, of course, perpetrates that architecturally inflected Freudian slip. […]
John Motley
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Affair at the Jupiter Hotel
Since it began in 2004, the Affair at the Jupiter Hotel has become a permanent fixture in Portland’s busiest month for the arts. “We think of it as a mature project now,” said Laurel Gitlen of small A projects, who co-founded the annual art fair with Stuart Horodner, currently the program director at the Atlanta […]
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From Auckland with Love
The Brunettes Bring Kiwi Pop Back
It’s a simple boy-meets-girl story. Heather Mansfield had just moved to the metropolis of Auckland, New Zealand and joined Yoko, a band in which she “sang poems and pretended to play guitar.” Jonathan Bree was playing in his cousin’s country-pop band, the Nudie Suits. When the two bands shared a bill, they met and discovered […]
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Jenene Nagy
False Flat
For a city with such a lively art scene, the summer months in Portland barely register a pulse. Thankfully, September signals a return to full-swing programming with the high-profile TBA festival and the Affair at the Jupiter Hotel, although notable exhibitions crop up in less expected places, too. Over the past two years Jenene Nagy […]
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Gabriel Liston
Tearfully Remembering Familiar Things
When Gabriel Liston first showed at the New American Art Union two years ago, his drawings and paintings were dominated by an aching nostalgia. Executed in an illustrative storybook style (and, in some cases, on editions of Moby Books’ Illustrated Classics), Liston’s images yearned for childhood while acknowledging it as an unrecoverable time. As the […]
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Joe Thurston
Then, Quite Suddenly, We Were Simply No Longer Anywhere
After three solo exhibitions at the Mark Woolley Gallery, Portland artist Joe Thurston has moved on to his first show at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. And apparently he has left his signature style behind, too. Where Thurston’s previous body of work was dominated by figurative, folksy portraits, the paintings in Then, Quite Suddenly, We Were […]
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Camouflage
Portland Art Museum
Are the predictable repetitions of pattern the safe stuff of wallpaper, or an expressive avenue for abstraction? The Portland Art Museum’s recently opened Camouflage exhibition suggests that the latter is true. Featuring eight works by five artists, the paintings use pattern in a way that obscures its essential quality. That is: Monotonous construction transcends itself, […]
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Jim Neidhardt
Triple Threat in a Negative Space Blackfish Gallery
Tucked away in the back of Blackfish Gallery, local artist Jim Neidhardt’s installation pays tribute to the internalized rage of the workaday existence by recreating his own version of the post-five o’clock refuge. His space contains all the usual accoutrements: a ragged easy chair, reading lamp, newspaper, and dimly glowing television set. The scene’s only […]
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Bryan Schellinger
Although Bryan Schellinger’s first solo exhibition at Quality Pictures focuses on a new body of paintings, there is one important departure. On the floor in the center of the gallery, hundreds of black gumballs are contained in a white frame. The arrangement of tiny spheres creates a mosaic-like effect, but it also provides an enlightening—if […]
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Yesterday Once More
Papercuts Refuse to “Throw the Past Away”
When San Francisco’s Papercuts released its second album, Can’t Go Back, earlier this year, it was hailed as a kind of time-warped paean to late-’60s pop. And while the loose and bleary-eyed rock of “Take the 227th Exit” and “Outside Looking In” sounds like the stuff of Dylan’s jingle-jangle mornings, Can’t Go Back is hardly […]
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Craft in America: Expanding Traditions
In the world of fine arts, crafts are often relegated to second-class status. Consider how even the term “arts and crafts” perpetuates this stigma: Crafts are the cultural tagalong, too important to be excluded from the equation, but necessarily separated. In other words, craft is art, but it’s also not art. It’s a contradiction rooted […]
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David Eckard
Liveries (summer stock)
Although David Eckard is one of Portland’s most established and respected artists, much of his recent work has been so rigorously conceptual that it has obliterated much chance for aesthetic redemption. In other words, it works for the head, but doesn’t satisfy the gut. Along with his recent Locus exhibition at Chambers Fine Art, this […]